A day after he resigned from the Tripura Assembly as BJP MLA, Diba Chandra Hrangkhawl on Thursday joined the Congress.
Before he moved to the BJP in 2018, Hrangkhawl, who started with a tribal outfit, had been a three-time Congress MLA from his seat Karamcherra in Dhalai. He re-joined the Congress, along with BJP leader Rajkumar Sarkar and Trinamool Congress youth leader Rakesh Das.
Addressing the rally, which drew a good crowd despite a BJP meeting that was on nearby, AICC general secretary in-charge of Tripura Ajay Kumar claimed unemployment was on the rise under the BJP government, and said the Congress would organise a state-wide campaign against BJP “misrule”. “BJP ki ulti ginti aaj se shuru (The countdown for the BJP’s end starts today),” he said.
Days ago, the Congress, CPI(M), CPI, Forward Bloc, Revolutionary Socialist Party and the CPI(M-L) had issued a joint statement appealing to “peace-loving, democratic” people of Tripura to come together against the BJP.
Asked about an alliance between the parties, Kumar said the Congress was ready to make “sacrifices” in the interest of Tripura.
Welcoming Hrangkhawl into the party, he said it would boost the Congress and that many others were in talks with them.
Former minister and the lone Tripura Congress MLA, Sudip Roy Barman, who also addressed the rally, said none of the promises the BJP had made in its vision document had been fulfilled, listing promises such as “permanent job solution for 10,323 retrenched school teachers of the state, and regularisation of contractual jobs of Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and Rashtriya Madhyamik Siksha Abhiyan teachers”.
On his own stint as a minister in the BJP-IPFT government, Barman said he had worked to the best of his ability and did not let politics influence his work.